Sunday, October 19, 2008

Give Him Liberty

Notes from Saturday's Barack Obama rally at the grounds of the Liberty Memorial:

*The Star uses a park official's attendance estimate of 75,000. Based on my experience at music festivals at the same site, I'd say the number was closer to 45,000.

*What was the deal with the weird stage placement that artificially limited good sightlines? Thousands of people, myself included, could only listen to the candidate.

*This mildly creepy image aside, the cult of personality mania wasn't as severe as I had anticipated. Still, I empathized with a guy wearing a "Go Jesus" t-shirt who was hollering about how no mortal can offer salvation.

*I was suckered into the pointless email R.S.V.P. for the event on Friday. I've since received five spam emails from the Obama camp. The most annoying of them offers a "limited edition car magnet" for ten dollars.

6 Comments:

Once you realize that the makeup of political parties is there there's republicans (who are either wealthy or socially conservative establishment types, easily scared and influenced) and there's everybody ELSE who tend to be democrat.

Since people are weird, there are going to be weird democrats.

The stage placement was probably the Secret Service's doing and it was deliberate.

Sorry you felt the way you did. You must be a republican. I heard lots of people were glad they were there.

I likewise have been angered by the "auto spam" effect of emailing the campaign. I did it as a journalist asking for an address for something. Commence spam. They will take you off after a couple of requests. I, hence, was not duped into RSVP. Also, didn't go this time, based on experience. (Saw him at the Uptown when came with Claire McCaskill / other friends froze at Municipal for hours. Let's hope that the people who can stand to stand for hours and hours to see a candidate will actually vote for someone on election day.)